When I studied clinical medicine for my bachelor degree in China, I found clinicians are sometimes powerless in the face of disease due to limited strategies. Therefore, I choose to focus on basic research during my Master’s studies to investigate pathogenesis as well as mechanism underlying diseases so that we could develop efficient therapeutic approaches.
My research area and interests center on retinal neurodegenerative diseases, such as glaucoma, AMD, diabetic retinopathy, resulting in irreversible blindness. Through my master studies, I’m aware of the complicated mechanism of retinal degeneration. This unknown as well as the unmet need of retinal neurodegenerative disease patients have challenged us and have inspired me to delve deeper into this field of research.
In RETORNA project, I am fascinated by the investigation of miRNA therapy in retinal diseases, which is a novel approach to treat retinal disorder efficiently and precisely. In addition, I’m also interested in the utilization of big dataset, which facilitates to identification of therapeutic targets. I am certain that I could obtain professional training in this multidisciplinary team and gain new insights into targeting retinal diseases. I also believe my academic knowledge on biomedicine as well as my research experience on retinal studies could help me make a meaningful contribution in RETORNA project. I hope we could figure out more puzzles underlying retinal neurodegenerative diseases and help patients together!